I call them “the new angryphones.” I’ve heard from quite a few of them in the past couple of months, since I wrote what some of them call “that column,” about the social acceptability of anglo-bashing in Quebec.
This new genus of angryphone is younger than the ones who attended partitionist meetings after the sovereignists’ near-victory in the 1995 referendum. Many of them are baby boomers who heard John F. Kennedy tell Americans to ask themselves what they could do for their country, and the answer Pierre Trudeau gave English Canadians for theirs: learn French.
So, out of the idealism of the 1960s, long before Bill 101, they did what speakers of the world’s dominant language normally don’t do: they began to learn another language, and to have it taught to their children. And when others fled the first Parti Québécois government, they stayed; they bet their futures, and those of their children, on Quebec.
So they’re still here to read and hear what’s said about them by Québécois politicians, media commentators and entertainers, and they’re fluent enough in French to understand it. They can read L’actualité’s “dossier” on them on the magazine’s website and decide for themselves whether it’s journalism or something closer to high-class hate literature on the glossy paper of a quality magazine.
With age and experience, the idealism of their youth has given way to realism. They know they have been left politically voiceless, not by a lack of the right leadership or representation, but by fear of political separation.
So they – we – realize that conditions for our community are not likely to improve. We understand that in any forum more public than a dinner table, a “conversation” on language will be brief:
“Well, the English-speaking community needs – ” “Non! C’est le français qui est menacé!”
And we don’t expect to be thanked for investing more personal effort in strengthening the French language in Quebec than most Québécois have.
All we hope for now is to be left in peace.
Instead – and this is what has made us angry – we find ourselves once again under sustained public attack, as we had not been since the controversy over the language of commercial signs in the late 1980s.
We find ourselves to be such pariahs that not a single politician, not even among those we elect, has protested against L’actualité’s smearing us, as they all did against Maclean’s magazine’s cover story on corruption in Quebec two years ago.
And we find ourselves playing a game I call “angloball.” It’s like football, but with only one team, formed by us anglos, and with a movable goal line. As we near the goal line by learning French, the line is moved farther away, so that the new goal is for every last one of us to speak French. Then we’re told by L’actualité that we must also support Bill 101, and, in the privacy of our homes, read books in French.
We realize it’s a game we can’t win without abandoning our own language, culture and identity.
And we’re tired of playing it for the amusement of those for whom we will always be not an asset but a problem for Quebec, not exemplary allies for French but the enemy.
We are the enemy – historic, political and, above all, cultural.
It’s been only 253 years since the battle on the Plains of Abraham, and the English and French had been fighting each other for seven centuries before that.
Now, we’re an obstacle to political progress. Were it not for the votes of the “blocking minority,” as a former publisher of Le Devoir called us, the Quebec question would be settled. Either Canada would be forced to the constitutional negotiating table, or Quebec would secede.
And by refusing to “integrate” – that is, to assimilate – we English exclude ourselves from the Québécois mainstream. Thus we set a bad example for immigrants. And our community, by its mere existence, provides an alternative for immigrants, and competes to recruit them.
Even the premier speaks of us in terms usually reserved for an enemy. The Québécois must remain “vigilant” to protect their language, Jean Charest said recently in Paris, because “we are surrounded by anglophones.”
So if the English encircling the fort are a hostile force, then logically those of us inside its walls must form a disloyal fifth column.
Not surprisingly, results of a poll by Léger Marketing for the Association for Canadian Studies and The Gazette published this week suggest that the opinion leaders’ negative attitude toward us is widely shared.
With admirable candour, 51 per cent of Québécois admitted that most members of their linguistic community do not “feel positively” about the English, to 43 per cent who claimed they did. So the 71 per cent of us English who think that most Québécois don’t “feel positively” about us aren’t imagining things.
We and our children could place another bet on Quebec, this time on the Québécois “children of Bill 101” in Sugar Sammy’s audience or who write for Voir. But it wouldn’t be a sure bet.
A quarter-century ago, one young commentator was lionized by the English-Canadian media as a spokesman for a post-nationalist generation of Québécois “citizens of the world.”He has aged into the ranting Richard Martineau whom we now see leading a mob of his Journal de Montréal readers with torches and pitchforks against the minorities.
If an aging population and mounting debt cause economic and social conditions to deteriorate in the future, we will make readily available scapegoats.
In the meantime, the older generation still in power in Quebec doesn’t care to see our family DVDs of our children adorably singing in French in concerts at their immersion schools, or to hear our amusing anecdotes about accidentally speaking French with each other.
We new angryphones have got the message. We realize there’s only one thing they want from us.
By emigration if not by assimilation, they want us gone.
dmacpherson san montrealgazette.comTwitter: san MacphersonGaz