La Saint-Jean, Canada Day, and me in the middle

I’m between two identities — one that I acquired at birth and the other by inclination

Some people live between 1st and 2nd Aves. Others, between a rock and a hard place.

All my life, I’ve lived between Saint-JeanBaptiste Day and Canada Day. Between two identities, one acquired at birth, the second by inclination.

Note that I did not call la Saint-Jean by its real name since 1977, the Fête nationale. A year after gaining power, René Lévesque made the change to create a more inclusive holiday, as opposed to a Catholic, French-Canadians-onlyneed-attend celebration.

That’s the official party line. I suspect that “Fête nationale” had a nice ring of independence to it as opposed to the more folkloric Saint-Jean.

I never adopted the new designation, in homage to the Saint-Jean-Baptiste of my childhood. I remember standing with my mother on the corner of Bourbonnière Ave. and Sherbrooke St. to watch the parade, waiting for my favourite float carrying a young boy with curly blond hair with a sheep at his side, representing Jesus’s cousin, John the Baptist. A Jewish preacher. But I did not know that at the time.

My dad hated the parade. To him, the sheep symbolized French-Canadian feebleness. The boy and his woolly sidekick disappeared in 1964 and the parade was never the same afterwards.

Truth is, la Saint-Jean, as many Québécois still call it, was politicized beyond repair by the 1968 riots when the crowd, led by independence firebrand Pierre Bourgault, reacted violently to Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s presence at the parade, perceived, rightly so, as a provocation. My mother, who was neither a separatist nor a teenage hothead, was beaten on the head by the police while trying to escape the rioting crowd.

Historian Jean-Claude Germain believes that Trudeau’s presence was calculated to help him win the federal elections the following day: “Pierre Elliott Trudeau smiled through the whole thing. His election was assured in the rest of Canada. Law and order! PET was the man Canadians needed to keep Quebec in its place,” he wrote.

I remember — barely, considering the amount of intoxicants consumed — celebrating la SaintJean in Old Montreal during the 1970s. Forget la patrie; it was just an excuse to go crazy. But as the tone became more and more political while the PQ was preparing its first referendum, I lost interest. I could not, however, escape the neighbourhood parties. Every Saint-Jean, the guy next door would bring his drum kit out in the lane and bang along to English Top 40 songs, getting more and more out of sync as he got drunker and drunker. It was wild.

I define myself as a federalist Quebec nationalist. As Liberal premier Jean Lesage, who presided over the Quiet Revolution, once said, “Canada is my country, Quebec is my motherland.” But I don’t have a single memory of celebrating Canada Day, or Dominion Day as it was called until 1982, the year of the divisive patriation of the Constitution.

For the longest time, few Québécois artists would participate in Canada Day celebrations, except for the likes of rocker Michel Pagliaro, R&B singer Melody Stewart and disco queen Patsy Gallant — lightweights compared to Gilles Vigneault, Ginette Reno and Félix Leclerc.

For the longest time, entertaining Canada Day crowds was a kiss of death for Quebec artists. No longer. And a good thing, too. (Next step is having anglophone artists sing in English at la Saint-Jean.) But overall, francophone participation in the celebrations remains microscopic. Among friends and acquaintances, I don’t know a single francophone federalist who made the trek to Ottawa last year for the Canada 150 party. Canada is a pragmatic creation, a compromise. Not an affair of the heart. As our prime minister himself pointed out, “Canada has no core identity.”

I think he’s dead wrong, but we still haven’t found a way to express the joy of being Canadian the way the Québécois celebrate being Québécois. It’s even more complicated when one loves being both.

Why?