I've always believed that journalism is about annoying people. My opinion of this job is that it is done badly by those who confirm the received wisdom of their readers, and done well by those who challenge and criticize the status quo. Newspapers that force readers to re-examine their ideas get the highest return on the gift of free speech: the chance to help their community progress, adapt and grow.
And if there was ever a community that needs to progress, adapt and grow, it's Quebec's English-speaking minority. Without a doubt one of the most isolationist and anti-integrationist communities in the world, the English of this province spend most of their waking hours worrying that their ability to remain separate from the people around them will be further eroded by the rise of Quebec separatism.
That is the essential English-Quebec characteristic - a desire to remain untouched by the changes necessarily brought about by the close presence of a separatist movement. If there is one thing an anglophone wants, it's to be left alone - even if it means going to the extraordinary lengths of learning a second language. "We've learned French - what more do they want?" is a constant complaint of the English. But it can't really be a complaint, since the very same people so exhausted by the experience will admit that learning French is historically just, not to mention enlightening and advantageous. You can no sooner complain about learning to speak French in Quebec than you can about learning to walk. No, it's no complaint, it's an attempt to distract the rest of the world from the real goal of English Quebecers: to remain apart.
You can be Italian in this province, and speak Italian at home, without insisting on separate university and hospital systems. You can be Chinese, or a member of numerous other minority-language communities, and enjoy the culture and beauty of your language and heritage without demanding constitutional protection. But you can't do that if you're English. The English need to send their children to separate schools and separate hospitals. They need to read separate newspapers and have separate leaders. They require special protection, special treatment, special exemptions. They must stand apart from the other minorities of Quebec, or they will die. And death, if you haven't already figured it out, is caused by integration. Let the Chinese, the Haitians, the Italians, the Jamaicans, the East Indians and the Greeks die the figurative death brought about by Bill 101, but, by Jove, it will never happen to an English person.
To suggest otherwise is to incur the wrath of the mob. When the 1995 referendum was called, I suggested in a column that I might vote yes. It was mostly a joke; the campaign was just beginning, polls suggested the result would be 60-40 against separation again, and I was exasperated by the thought of having to go through what seemed like a pointless and divisive exercise. Against my better judgement, I ended up repeating my little joke on an English-language television newscast. Within a day, I had received personal threats and threats against the newspaper I worked for. Two callers accused me of betraying my family and my father, a Liberal member of the National Assembly from 1978 to 1987 (and a good friend).
And yet it is the English who love to call Quebec's French-speaking majority "tribal."
It's sad and funny that when you get to the bottom of the Quebec-Canada debate you discover that the English and the French of this province want the same thing: the right to exist apart. The English-speaking minority of Quebec is separate from the mainstream, and it wants to remain so by preserving its traditions and institutions through the weight of its attachment to English Canada. The French-speaking majority wants to preserve its unique traditions and institutions, and a majority within that majority (over 60 per cent in the 1996 referendum) wants to leave Canada in order to do so. We could be said to share the same motto: "Let the rest of the world change - we want to preserve our tiny portion of the planet in our own image."
Yet neither side is willing to admit that the other has a point. Each wants separation on its own terms, and each considers its terms to be the only legitimate ones. Thus, separation for one side comes at the expense of the other's principles. We are trapped by our own arguments; the English and French in Quebec both accept the legitimacy of the desire to remain, or become, separate, but neither is able to grant their neighbors the courtesy of admitting that separation could be valid for them, too.
As an English-speaking Montrealer born and raised in Westmount, it would be natural for me to criticize ad infinitum the francophone side of this contorted equation, but it would serve no useful journalistic purpose. Anglophones in Quebec don't need to hear anymore clichés about the evils of separatism and benefits of federalism, and anyway the Gazette has cornered the market in that discourse. What Quebec anglophones need is to re-examine the assumptions and dogma that have guided them through the past 50 years. They need to question their all-consuming desire to remain separate from the world around them.
And make no mistake about it - the French in Quebec need the same thing.
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