‘IT WAS A LANGUAGE I HAD TO UNDERSTAND’

Graham Fraser realized his lack of French left him missing out on a big part of Canada

In this series of columns, onetime Alliance Quebec president and media personality Royal Orr reflects on his relationship with his second language.

There’s something of the Oxford don or even an English country gentleman in Graham Fraser. It’s enhanced by the post-retirement beard he now sports, tastefully trimmed, and by his courteous manner and sunny greeting as he slides into a booth at the Elgin Street Diner in Ottawa.

It’s a bit foolhardy to set oneself the task of interviewing one of the country’s most experienced and celebrated journalists and Canada’s longestserving Commissioner of Official Languages about language in Canada, and then writing an account of the exchange that he will probably read.

But here we are — in for a penny and all that.

Mugs of coffee appear immediately, and there’s a quick update on his various projects since leaving the job of commissioner. Then his health-conscious breakfast arrives (poached eggs, whole wheat toast, sliced tomatoes) and we start talking about how he “fell in love” with the French language and became one of the rare journalists who regularly wrote for both French and English audiences in Canada.

“I have a very vivid recollection of two incidents,” he said. “In my last year of high school a friend invited me to hear Gilles Vigneault at Hart House in Toronto. This was in 1964 and I was dazzled — just blown away. I thought, ‘I can’t understand a word he’s singing but I want to be able to understand that.’ ”

The other incident was more mundane, but somehow more suggestive of the exploration of language issues that Fraser would put at the heart of his journalistic efforts. It came a year later, when he was home in Ottawa and in the lobby of the National Gallery late one afternoon.

“Some staffer was leaving work and stopped to chat in French with a security guard. They were just exchanging a few pleasantries and quips but I was filled with envy by their ease in both languages,” remembered Fraser. “I’d grown up in Ottawa and back then French was very much a private language, not a public language.

“But again, I just had this powerful feeling that it was a language I had to understand.”

Through a series of jobs and postings as a journalist, Fraser put himself on the path of realizing his youthful ambition to make French his own.

“Jean Paré at L’actualité invited me to write my first piece in French,” he said, “a profile of Dr. Camille Laurin.”

Is there a Quebecer of my generation who doesn’t feel an immediate surge of emotion hearing the name of “the Father of Bill 101”? For me, I’m afraid, it’s mostly negative emotion. Something about the guy always freaked me out.

“As a psychiatrist, Laurin concluded that forced bilingualism was diminishing and humiliating for francophone Quebecers and undermining of their mental health,” said Fraser. “He genuinely saw it as a psychiatric issue.”

Fraser was based at the National Assembly and interviewed Laurin at length on a number of occasions.

“I got along with him very well,” Fraser said over a second refill of coffee. “It was characteristic of Laurin that he never softened the hard edges of his position; there was a brutal Cartesian quality to him — you establish the principle, then you unfold the implications that flow rationally from it.”

And then another name from that era of intense political struggling over language and ultimately over the souls of Quebec and Canada.

“Nobody stood up to him on his own Cartesian terms except Bill Johnson,” remembered Fraser, referring to the former Gazette journalist and one-time president of Alliance Quebec. “Bill Johnson was the only one — and he was himself trained by the Jesuits — to say to Laurin, ‘Wrongo! Your basic premise is off !’ ”

Then he laughed with pleasure at the memory.

They were just exchanging a few pleasantries and quips but I was filled with envy by their ease in both languages. GRAHAM FRASER, Commissioner of Official Languages

As we shake hands goodbye outside the diner, Fraser is as sunny as the late April morning and I can’t help thinking: Is there some way to bottle his kind of good will and distribute it to all Canadians?