Sovereign Quebec means more than words
Former literature prof among native English speakers who want a country called Quebec
MONTREAL— Jennifer Drouin, a law student and former McGill University literature professor, has been a convinced sovereigntist and cardcarrying member of the Parti Québécois since 1998.
But it was only three years later that she left rural Nova Scotia and could truly call Quebec her home.
In1996 she came for the summer as an English speaker interested in the French language and Québécois culture. She returned for a relationship that led to marriage and gave Drouin, 40, her French-flavoured last name.
In 2001 she came to stay, starting a doctorate in French adaptations in Quebec of William Shakespeare’s works that have been produced since the Quiet Revolution, the nationalist movement that gave rise to sovereignty.
Since, Drouin has flourished in a province often divided by language disputes and identity debates pitting the francophone majority against all others.
For more than a decade she has been that rare and misunderstood specimen — an anglophone independentiste, a native English speaker who requests her federal tax forms in the language of Molière, who insists on placing her restaurant orders en français and who dreams one day of living in a country called Quebec.
“I’m an English Canadian and I’m a Quebecer. In my head they’re like two separate countries already and I love both of them,” said Drouin, “I watch Rick Mercer every week like every other English Canadian. I haven’t missed an episode of Coronation Street since I was 12 years old.”
But her cultural references now also include Quebecois icons such as poets Gérald Godin and Gaston Miron, as well as songwriter Pauline Julien.
“It’s a two-fer. It’s twice the culture and twice the richesse,” she said.
Last year, Drouin founded the non- partisan advocacy group Anglophones for Quebec Independence, which she said counts about 100 members. She was elected this summer to the PQ’s national council.
Last Monday, she announced that she would seek the PQ nomination in a downtown Montreal riding for the 2018 provincial election.
She doesn’t stand out for her sovereignty arguments: she is against pipelines and for Quebec tax dollars being spent on local priorities such as schools and hospitals rather than on western Canadian oil or automotive production in Ontario.
Nor is she the first anglophone sovereigntist to be misunderstood, probed and prodded as some sort of sociological oddity.
Henry Milner was denounced as a traitor.
“There was a fascination with us 40 years ago, so I imagine the fascination hasn’t stopped,” said the former high-level member of the PQ.
Milner ran the Committee of Anglophones for Sovereignty-Association in the lead-up to the 1980 independence referendum using a playful but unsuccessful slogan: “Oui love Québec.”
Almost every morning in the lead up to the May 20, 1980 vote, Milner’s home telephone would ring and the caller would leave a sort of “hate poem” on the answering machine. He laughs about it today, but was worried enough to consult the police about it back then.
Milner’s sovereigntist sentiments were an extension of his politics. He advocated for municipal reform and worked in Quebec’s trade-union movement. Times were a-changing in the 1970s. He saw the promise of a more equal and just society outside of the Canadian federation, as did many of his francophone colleagues.
Language was a secondary consideration — a means of communication. For many other anglophones, though, it was an insurmountable barrier.
“There was never an issue of which side I was on. The only issue was: do I come out publicly and take a leading role or not?” said Milner, now a political science professor at Université de Montreal. “That was the more difficult decision . . . My parents were not too thrilled.”
In the 1980 referendum campaign he was a liaison between PQ leader René Lévesque, his cabinet and the English-speaking voters.
“I didn’t have any illusions that I could sign up lots of anglophones. But I could serve as an intermediary . . . so that there would be more understanding even if there wasn’t a changing of minds.”
In 1981, Milner was a candidate in the predominately English riding of Westmount—Saint-Georges. He finished second, about 18,000 votes behind the Liberal victor.
But another anglophone named David Payne, a Brit who moved to Quebec in 1971 and served as executive secretary to the Levesque government, won his riding. He was defeated by close margins in the two subsequent campaigns, then reelected twice more in 1994 and 1998.
Both he and Milner were part of a 1993 PQ task force that outlined how anglophone speakers would be vital to a sovereign Quebec and protected within the new country that never came to be. But any goodwill established ahead of the 1995 referendum evaporated when Premier Jacques Parizeau blamed the loss on “money and the ethnic vote.”
“That one phrase of Parizeau that night in a sense made it look like everything done before was meaningless,” Milner said.
But the effort to bring Englishspeaking Quebecers into the political movement was genuine then, and Milner believes it is genuine now.
He is not in the trenches anymore, but he shared his historical files with Drouin, as well as a few tips from his days as the anglo point man for independence.
Drouin said she too is trying to act as a conduit, much as she did in academia, where she wrote in English about Quebec’s French-language treatments of Shakespeare, the English language’s most famous wordsmith.
“In both cases I’m building a bridge between the two solitudes.”