(Warning: This text uses the words “man” and “woman” and includes exclamation points. Sensitive hearts refrain.)
Do you remember the cult RBO sketch which showed French speakers sending Anglos to re-education camps?
If we believe Maclean’sthis is what is likely to happen soon in Quebec.
Indeed, on the front page of its latest edition, the most important news magazine in Canada states that Quebec has declared war on the Anglos!
Nothing less!
Screenshot
THE END OF “HARMONY”
You have to read this gem to realize how paranoid the country’s English speakers have become.
Just barely if we don’t say that the English-speaking men and women of Quebec must hide in their basement to speak their mother tongue, away from the microphones of the police who monitor their every word.
The author, Mark Mann (who would pass Mordecai Richler for Camille Laurin), presents himself as a die-hard Francophile who was watching Denis Villeneuve films the summer he lost his virginity in a small Acadian village.
Living in the Villeray district, Mr. Mann has always loved Montreal, a cosmopolitan and vibrant city where English-speakers and French-speakers have long lived in peace.
Unfortunately, he laments, the harmony that reigned between the two communities (“harmony”, I imagine, embodied by the very generous “Bonjour/Hi”) is now broken.
All this because of François Legault who, in order to consolidate his image as a nationalist savior, deliberately “pitted” the French speakers against the English speakers, Montreal against the rest of the province, and Quebec against the rest of Canada.
This anti-Anglo climate, says Mark Mann, began with the rise of the ADQ, a “right-wing populist party” popular with the “native” majority, which fueled a “sense of resentment” within that clientele against all those who did not “share their white Christian European heritage”.
You read correctly.
A little more, and it was said that the ADQ was a branch of the KKK!
- Listen to the Martineau – Dutrizac meeting between Benoît Dutrizac and Richard Martineau via QUB :
MONTREAL “TOO MULTICULTURAL”
And things subsequently got worse with the arrival of François Legault who not only founded a party by allying with the ADQ (“taking under his wing the cultural war led by this conservative party”), but makes “danger against French” the trademark of his new formation!
For Mr. Mann, CAQ voters consider that the “cosmopolitanism of Montreal represents an insidious threat to their vision of Quebec society.”
Nothing about the decline of French in Montreal. Nothing about the decline of French as a working language. Nothing about the difficulty faced by French-speakers in Montreal in being served in their language when they enter downtown businesses.
These are all unimportant details.
No, if the “CAQ voters” have declared war on Montreal, it is because the Quebec metropolis is too colorful and too multicultural.
In short, Quebecers are intolerant (a familiar theme).
Fortunately, says the author, young French-speaking people find that François Legault is “an aggressive and reactionary uncle.”
Phew! There is hope!