We’ve got the wrong idea about Jean-François Lisée, the sovereignist strategist behind the hatchet job on us English-speaking Quebecers in the issue of L’actualité magazine still on newsstands.
He’s really our friend. He said so in an article published on the Opinion page (“Poll result surprised L’actualité,” March 29), and on his blog on the L’actualité website. I would not be surprised if some of his best friends are anglos.
Jean-François – friends should be on a first-name basis – also wants to be our teacher. In our ignorance, we thought we had satisfied what Bill 101 required of us. We thought we had done so by learning French and speaking it outside our homes, thereby doing our part to meet Bill 101’s objective of making French the common language of Quebec.
Not nearly good enough, our friend has informed us in L’actualité and on his blog. Not only must we obey a law that has intentionally weakened our community, we must embrace it.
And as the Québécois abandon Montreal Island to us, we must take up the cause of defending French – against ourselves.
Because we have neglected our duty, our friend suggests on his blog that we reflect on the error of our ways and engage in some “introspection.”
To help us, he has assigned homework. As he makes clear in L’actualité, Jean-François – who would have made a good priest – disapproves of how we have been wasting our leisure time.
In the privacy of our own homes, we English have been sneaking peeks at the wrong television programs, the wrong books, the wrong websites – that is, in our own language, as the Québécois also prefer to do.
Rest assured that our friend has not been peeping through our windows. Rather, he had L’actualité commission a web poll in which the magazine says in its current April 15 edition that 560 anglos participated.
This is the poll, its loaded questions suggested by Jean-François, whose predictable results tell us that if we’d been listening to the right radio stations, we’d know who Marie-Mai is.
No doubt a similar test of the Québécois’s knowledge of English Canada would reveal similar ignorance. That, naturally, would be blamed on English Canada, for not being interesting enough.
In his article in The Gazette, our friend mentioned some positions ostensibly in favour of the English-speaking community that he has taken in the past.
He did not mention, however, his proposal of only two years ago to abolish English CEGEPs.
Or his proposal of five years ago for a form of “literacy test” for newcomers wishing to vote in Quebec, including Canadian citizens from other provinces.
Or his contribution to the recent rise of anglo-bashing in Quebec, when in November he invited readers of his blog to recount their anecdotal evidence of Montreal anglos who had refused to learn French.
And with uncharacteristic modesty, Jean-François described himself merely as “a separatist.” In fact, he’s been the best-known strategist of the sovereignty movement since 1994, when, as a journalist in mid-interview, he offered his services as an adviser to Jacques Parizeau.
It was as a strategist that our friend took the ostensibly pro-anglo positions mentioned in his article, which were primarily intended to advance the interests of the sovereignty movement.
He still called himself a journalist in the article, although Radio-Canada, at least, disagrees; it dropped him as a political analyst immediately after it was announced in February that he had joined a Parti Québécois sovereignty-strategy committee, a change in his status that L’actualité (and The Gazette, in publishing his article) neglected to mention.
Jean-François was markedly friendlier to us in The Gazette than in his L’actualité articles or the blog posts in which he promoted the articles starting before their publication, with exclamation marks emitting little typographical shrieks of horror at our supposed indifference to French.
The “dossier” on anglos that our friend helped L’actualité to compile played nicely into the increasingly xenophobic Parti Québécois’s campaign against minorities.
Alerted by his cries, his party called a news conference to express its alarm, not at anything we had actually done, but at offences of opinion that members of a minority with little political influence had been entrapped into revealing in a poll.
With friends like Jean-François …
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dmacpherson BQb montrealgazette.com
Twitter: BQb MacphersonGaz