From the end of June until mid-July, the national holidays of Quebec, Canada, the United States and France follow one another.
Posted at 12:00 p.m.
For me, it’s always a surreal moment where I watch in amazement at the nationalistic fervor of the patriots of these nations. I admit that national pride is not something I understand. Not even when the Canadian makes the playoffs! Not that Quebec doesn’t have something to be proud of.
It’s incredible here and I’m proud of a package of social choices that Quebec has made in its history, but from there to me, personally, being proud to be Quebecers, not sure.
How can I be proud of something I didn’t even work for? It was only the chaos of the lottery of life that brought me here. I came with no GPS, no plane ticket and no passport (although at the time you could get one without even camping at Service Canada). I am a de facto Quebecer.
Before the most reactive readers call me ungrateful, I want to say that I’m particularly happy to be a little guy from here and that I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else…
Well, I would go and spend my winters in Fort Lauderdale, but that just makes me a snowbird and that’s the pinnacle of being a Quebecer.
But, what is that, a Quebecer?
In recent years, we have begun to redefine words like “man” and “woman” by realizing that they contain two distinct concepts within them: sex and gender. Another word that deserves to be clarified in this way is the word “Quebecois”.
Sometimes, it is used to designate all the inhabitants of Quebec; sometimes it is used to designate “native” Quebecers. I admit that I like the first definition better, because, hey, there’s more room for me in that one.
Pierre Falardeau said: “There are Quebecers from all backgrounds”.
Faque, quose that, a Quebecer?
Hello/Hi!
Often, we put the linguistic element at the heart of the Quebec identity and I find that this is a partial truth. English-speaking families who have been in Quebec for centuries, aren’t they Quebecers? What about First Nations people?
On Saint-Jean, François Legault published a text in which he said: “Quebecers of all generations, of all regions and of all origins, let us unite, every day, around French. Let’s take over from our ancestors. »
But these are two propositions that are mutually exclusive, either we are of diverse origins or we have common ancestors. Not both. You have to make up your mind, François!
By putting French and French ancestors at the heart of what makes up “we”, our Prime Minister reiterates that continuing to defend our language is important in the name of historical continuity. But, according to this logic, why not defend with as much fervor the indigenous languages of the territory?
It seems obvious to me that to be Quebecers, one does not need to share the same ancestors, nor even, perhaps, the same language. Anyway allophone immigrants, if they send their children to public school, in a single generation, these little ones will “sing lark without a false note”. Don’t freak out with that.
We often hear that our diversity is our wealth and that too is a partial truth. Our wealth also lies in having common values and a common social project.
A democratic society that wants to be fair and just, a society where we take care of the most vulnerable and the sick, where we give academic opportunities to everyone and where we accept divergence, even that of people who put ketchup in their poutine… like me.