The secret to anglophone happiness in Quebec? Just ignore the politics
At last, here comes the old man down from the mountain, with the secret of happiness for Quebec anglos.
Actually, for us anglos, Quebec is, as Parti Québécois founder René Lévesque once conceded about Canada, “not the gulag,” referring to Soviet forced-labour camps.
It’s safe and peaceful. Taxes are high, but in return we get public services like subsidized daycare, and the cost of living, for housing in particular, is low. Even the long, harsh winters make us appreciate the warm-weather festivals and terrasses even more.
But the best thing about Quebec is the people. I’ve learned a lot from the Québécois about enjoying life, and I’m not alone.
In the fascinating book Cracking the Quebec Code, the authors write that we Quebec anglos are “hybrids” between Frenchspeaking Quebecers and English-Canadians in the rest of Canada.
In particular, more than anglos in the RoC, we prefer pleasure to responsibility, and report that we’re happy and laugh often.
But then there’s the politics, especially the psychologically wearing identity politics that’s been going on for more than half a century.
In the 1970s, the now-defunct Montreal Star reported an anglo dentist saying his patients’ dental health was deteriorating because they were grinding their teeth over politics.
Just in the past couple of weeks, Quebec politics has again been dominated by what to anglos is an overreaction to minor language issues.
For a week, the young Frenchspeaking manager of a new Adidas store in downtown Montreal was hounded by name in the popular Quebecor media as a traitor to his language.
The particulars of his offence? Ignorance of the unwritten rule of French predominance in media events like the store’s opening. Imagine: a manager of a running-shoe store who isn’t a media-relations expert.
At the National Assembly, no less than Premier Philippe Couillard piled on the store manager. Language minister Marie Montpetit demanded an apology from his bosses.
Mercifully for him, that wave of language hysteria was all but forgotten after the language minister launched a new one.
She described as “an irritant” the English word “hi” in “Bonjour-Hi,” the courteous and practical store greeting that assures customers they can be served in either French or English.
Even though it respects French predominance — the “Hi” comes after the “Bonjour,” after all — that little English word is an obsession of anglophobic columnists in (again) the Quebecor media.
Even the Liberal premier told the Assembly he’d “rather people said ‘Bonjour,’ ” instead of “Bonjour-Hi.”
This led to the Assembly’s unanimous adoption on Thursday of a PQ-Liberal motion solemnly “inviting” merchants and their employees to “warmly greet” customers with “Bonjour” only, implicitly freezing out the “Hi.” Seriously. The anti-Hi motion is purely symbolic, and has no legal effect. Still, surreal as all this may seem, the Assembly’s unanimous adoption of the motion represents a victory for anglophobes, since its underlying principle is that the use of English in public in Quebec, while legally tolerated, is to be discouraged.
Now even Couillard’s Liberals, who on identity issues don’t know what they stand for, have endorsed that principle.
Like so much of what the Assembly does, the anti-Hi motion “sends a message.”
There is no comparison between the general condition of Quebec anglos and that of blacks in the white-supremacist American South before the mid-1960s.
Still, without trivializing the latter, the message in the anti-Hi motion is similar to, in isolation, the one on signs on buses in the South ordering blacks to the back: They were not practically inconvenienced, since they could still ride the bus, but were reminded they were social unequals to whites.
And that, finally, brings us to the old man’s secret of happiness for anglos in Quebec. It’s very simple: Just ignore the politics. You’ll miss being regularly put in your proper place. But you’ll be happier. Even if it means you stop reading the column the old man is paid to write.