Apartheid, Quebec-style
Published: Thursday, April 20, 2006
Re: The Dream Is Indeed Dead, letter to the editor, April 19; How Separatism Went Sterile, Jonathan Kay, April 17.
Most of my friends have moved away; 80% of my former students have left; established institutions -- social and mercantile -- are hanging on by threads; more English schools are closed each year; high-end stores have long since left; and all the new Canadians in my Byzantine church are conversing comfortably with each other -- en francais. Nearly 300,000 Anglos have been excised from the province, while the Eastern Townships, settled by Loyalists and British immigrants and once 40% anglophone, have dwindled to 6% Anglo representation. Our downtown universities (shantytowns compared to the jewel of the north, Laval) survive mostly because of foreign and out-of-province patronage. Their enlightened faculties will energetically tackle any issue except the rather interesting one of a dying culture at their doorstep.
And there still is a language police. Recently a Monkland pub was forced to replace its neon street sign that featured the French word Taverne without the final "e". The cleansing of Quebec and the application of draconian social laws has been studiously ignored by my government in Ottawa. Worse, the mildest protesting reference creates frenzied knee-jerk reactions from the huddled tribe, most certainly from its media. If one serenely opines that the laws and the situation are fundamentally racist and that the English-speaking community is treated with a genteel but real Canadian brand of apartheid, one is greeted with embarrassed silence, or worse.
No one wants to be reminded. Ottawa prefers to tutor Afghans on democracy rather than consider its own elephant in the corner, quietly hoping that the problem -- via death and migration -- will just go away.
Separatism is neither dead nor out of fashion. It has muted into the de facto status quo. This is to the clear relief of our government and intelligentsia, who blithely ignore a state of affairs that in any other province would be considered tragic and unacceptable.
Roman Jarymowycz, Beaconsfield, Que.
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/....html?id=9bed88a8-d173-4434-8709-88b9f4d914f4
