In the minutes following the Alouettes’ Gray Cup victory, Marc-Antoine Dequoy made a political speech that was more important than he thought. The magnitude of the emotion and the intensity of the moment made him speak completely from his heart. And the message hit the nail on the head.
• Read also: Alouettes: Marc-Antoine Dequoy looks back on his fiery interview
• Read also: “Keep your English!” – Dequoy, completely unleashed after the Alouettes’ triumph
The next day, number 24 of the Alouettes tempered his message. Calmed, he weighed his words and framed his criticism. But he maintained his version on the merits: the Canadian Football League should be bilingual even though it has reserved a sometimes embarrassing place for French.
Personally, I liked Marc-Antoine Dequoy in both versions. The young man is charismatic. We believe him when he says there is no malice in his words.
I am convinced that the Alouettes communications team clearly preferred the polite and softened version of the star player’s comments. But for me, it’s the hot version that carries the real message.
- Listen to the Dutrizac – Dumont meeting broadcast live every day at 7:05 a.m. via QUB radio :
A real, well-felt cry
It’s this version, a bit like Mad Dog Vachon, which expresses fed up with the accumulation of small frustrations. It is the one that fully exposed a feeling very present among Quebecers: that of seeing Canada evolve and define itself without us.
Yes, the Canadian Football League forgot that it was bilingual. The unilingual national anthem in Toronto, in a final involving the Montreal team, we can’t imagine. No uneasiness among Torontonians, no one even thought about it.
I wasn’t in Hamilton on Sunday, but it is said that in the stadium, the displays were mainly in English, period. Let’s add the frustration of the Alouettes in the face of the absurd: the TV schedule announces a Toronto/Winnipeg final! Laughable! Imagine American TV getting the Super Bowl finalists wrong.
What we must understand is that the Canadian Football League does not live in isolation. She is representative of her country, Canada. It is evolving in the same direction as Canada.
Photo Agence QMI, JOEL LEMAY
The new Canada
Despite the efforts of the Trudeau government, French is becoming an irrelevant language outside Quebec. In the suburbs of Toronto, several languages have become significantly more important than French.
Forget the whole notion of a bilingual country based on two founding peoples and forget Quebec which would be a distinct society there. Outside of Quebec, all this is just gibberish from the past. English Canada, I should say “new Canada”, no longer fits this bill.
It is this conviction that allowed a host of the leaders’ debate in English to describe Quebec as a foreign society with a racism problem.
Whatever anyone says, Marc-Antoine Dequoy touched a sensitive chord. The French language, the respect, the feeling of being forgotten, a lot of Quebecers recognized themselves in his cry from the heart. Me first.
If I were responsible for marketing the Alouettes, I would have a good shipment of club jerseys made with the number 24. They will sell out…
