by Jim Duff, Editor, The Suburban
Saturday, august 20, 2005
as Canadians can see from the embarrassing admissions of Prime Minister's Office Principal Secretary Hélene Scherrer regarding the choice of the new governor-general, Paul Martin doesn't like to be bothered with details.
Martin wanted Michaëlle Jean because he correctly assessed the impact her nomination would have in Quebec, where the Bloc threatens to overrun many of the remaining 21 Liberal seats. However venal and self-serving the motivation behind the choice of a French-speaking Haitian-born Canadian, Jean is an inspired nomination that will resonate with the nearly one million members of Quebec's French-speaking cultural communities--Sephardic Jews, Lebanese Christians and arabs, Maghrebans--who make up a sizeable and growing slice of the provincial demographic.
Martin is fortunate that Jean is what she appears to be ‹ a multilingual crowd-pleaser who can think on her feet. He's also fortunate that the opposition to her nomination is sounding more and more like a lynch mob, be it from Ottawa-area Tory MP Pierre Poilievre who wants us all to e-mail the Queen, to the Quebec secessionist movement's radical fringe who would have us believe the new G-G's consort was an apologist for the Front de libération du Québec.
Martin is especially lucky that Conservative Opposition Leader Stephen Harper and his bumblers make the PMO team look almost professional by comparison.
But the uproar over Jean's nomination may prove to be a defining moment in francophone Quebec, where it's a given that public figures must profess to be Quebeckers first and Canadians second.
Ever since former premier Daniel Johnson made the critical error of telling Quebeckers he was first a Canadian, you'd be hard put many prominent francophones outside the business world who would dare repeat that. It's also why ultrafederalist-Tory-turned-provincial-Liberal-Premier Jean Charest had to support the National assembly motions condemning the federal Clarity act and declaring Quebec a nation. It's this province's version of a loyalty oath.
That protective need to subscribe to the collective rightthink is even more pronounced within Quebec's cultural community, where both Jean, a Radio-Canada anchor and her partner, filmmaker Jean-Daniel Lafond, made their living.
Like the Vatican, Radio-Canada thrives on dogmatic consensus; it's not for nothing that among journalists, the network's East-End headquarters is known as la maison mére--the mother house. Since the Quiet Revolution, Rad-Can has seen numerous ideological purges, from the bloodbath that followed the 1959 producer's strike led by the likes of the late PQ premier René Lévesque, to the 1980 post-referendum housecleaning of those suspected of sympathizing with the sovereigntist movement.
all that changed when TVa and Quatre-Saisons began challenging Radio-Canada for viewership. Unlike CBC Television in the rest of Canada, Radio-Canada is a major cultural force in Quebec, both for Quebec's ingrown and infinitely recyclable entertainment industry and for the millions of Quebeckers who prefer French-language programming over English or american television. It didn't hurt to have sovereigntist credentials at a time when just about every family in Quebec had members debating the merits of independence and federalism around the dinner table. People changed sides depending on the players and whether Quebec was in a federal or provincial election cycle.
at the same time, Quebec writers and filmmakers began reexamining the events leading up to the October Crisis of 1970. Nearly 60 percent of Quebeckers weren't born when the first bombs went off in 1963. For many of those under 40, names like Rocky Léja, Pierre Vallières, François Shirm, Jacques Lanctôt and the Rose brothers don't have the same meaning as they do for those who lived through the screaming headlines and the black-and-white photos.
Part of that re-examination lay in questioning accepted wisdoms, such as why the Sûrété du Québec didn't arrest the Rose brothers before their cell snatched Quebec Labour Minister Pierre Laporte, or who really killed him (conspiracy theories range from the CIa and the RCMP to the French secret service). another aspect was the social rehabilitation of those perceived by a new generation of salon sovereignists to have been true revolutionaries, men and women who paid for the blood on their hands with years in prison or exile.
It's ironic that many of the books and films which emerged as a result were funded by the Canada Council, the federal Publishers' assistance Program and Telefilm Canada. FLQ apologist filmmaker Pierre Falardeau and felquiste-turned publisher Jacques Lanctôt, arrested in 1970 in connection with plots to plant bombs and kidnap the Israeli and U.S. consuls, wouldn't have enjoyed their current notoriety without financial help from the Canadian taxpayer.
That was the context in which Jean and Lafond had to make a living. One can suspect they played at being salon separatists to win the confidence of people like Francis Simard and Pierre Vallières, but in a ideologically complex, shifting media marketplace like Quebec's, what advantage lay in being dogmatic federalists? One has only to look at the fate that befell federalist producer Robert Guy Scully ‹ cashiered ignominiously by la maison mére after the Gomery probe revealed his role in selling federalism ‹ to realize that heartfelt federalism doesn't fly in Quebec.
Last week, even as the Martin PMO was being shown yet again as a comically incompetent political improv theatre, Jean was saving Paul Martin's bacon with her resolute repudiation of any ties to the secessionist orthodoxy.
That's why the secessionists and their cheerleaders, people like Gazette columnist José Legault, must push their Lafond-is-a-traitor agenda with such fervor. They_ve all grasped how much damage the Jean/Lafond combination will hurt them among Quebeckers who will perceive of Jean as a symbol of how it no longer needs to be one or the other.
No wonder the secessionists choose to ignore the fact that Vallières, the co-author of the seminal Négres blancs de l'amerique, renounced Quebec independence prior to his death.
as for the Tories, anyone stupid enough to sign onto their witchhunt appears to have forgotten that the late Robert Bourassa considered calling a sovereignty referendum and that most of the federal Liberals' Quebec caucus flirted with independantisme at some point in their lives.
Whatever she once was, Jean has made it clear she's a Canadian. That's good enough for me, and I was there throughout the bombs, the bodies and the troops. Canadians should respect that.
Jim Duff is editor-in-chief of The Suburban Newspapers, Quebec's largest English-language weekly chain.
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