Bouts of national indignation over flags

Too bad about distancing, because lately, some Quebec nationalists seem to need a hug.

With the most Quebecers in decades feeling proud to be Canadian, and support for independence so low that pollsters don’t even bother asking about it anymore, certain nationalists have been in an especially touchy mood. Even imagined slights against nationalist symbols can cause an outbreak of indig-nationalism.

In late May, a reporter for CJAD radio tweeted a photo of a man at a demonstration in Montreal carrying a flag she called the “Quebec equivalent” of the Confederate battle flag symbolizing white supremacism in the United States.

Nationalists, including a candidate in the current Parti Québécois leadership campaign, identified the flag as that of the early-19th-century, mostly French-canadian, Patriote reformers. They demanded that the reporter apologize, which she did.

Actually, the nationalists were wrong about the flag. It wasn’t the Patriote original, but a late-20th-century modified version popularized by radical, anti-english secessionists and recently seen in anti-immigrant demonstrations.

Usually, indig-nationalism is directed at anglos. On one recent occasion, however, nationalists turned on … other nationalists.

Some were doubly infuriated in June by this year’s televised Fête nationale holiday concert. Not only did one performer wear a sticker against the anti-hijab Bill 21, no Quebec flags were visible.

The “Natfest” concert organizers apologized for the absence of the fleurdelisé, explaining that it was an oversight resulting from the exceptional circumstances of the pandemic.

No one thought to put flags on stage because usually, there are none. Instead, small flags are handed out to spectators. This year, however, there was no live audience.

It’s a plausible explanation. The annual event is funded by the Quebec government, which is currently nationalist, and which entrusts the production to a nationalist organization whose president is a former PQ candidate. They’re hardly likely to disrespect the Quebec flag intentionally.

Nevertheless, another campaigning PQ leadership candidate apparently suspected a deliberate depoliticization of the annual holiday celebrations in a victory of “multiculturalism over nationalism.”

And this week, the fleurdelisé supposedly came under attack again, from a previously little-known Quebec English-language youth organization that presented proposals for a flag officially representing the province’s anglophone community.

The proposals, submitted for an online vote, are an initiative of Y4Y Quebec, a two-yearold organization that receives public funding from Quebec as well as Ottawa. Its year-long flag project is financed by a $52,800 grant from a program of the federal Canadian Heritage department.

The project was inspired by a realization that, while French-language minorities in other provinces have their own symbols to rally around, Quebec anglos haven’t seen the need for one.

The project may seem innocent, but, as could have been expected about any manifestation of “Quebanglo” identity, one of “les Misérables,” the cranky nationalist commentators for the Québecor media empire, saw in it a sinister design.

The young people behind the flag project may not have realized it, but, Mathieu Bockcôté wrote, they were committing “an act of ideological opportunism.” They were seeking “a symbolic privilege in the public debate” for their fellow anglos by depicting English-speaking Quebecers as “a victimized minority.”

And here we get to disrespect for the fleurdelisé again. No one has suggested that the Quebanglo flag replace it. Regardless, to Bockcôté, the “demand” of an anglo symbol “must be understood for what it is: a way to reject the Quebec flag … all the symbols of the Québécois nation … the Québécois people in its own country,” no less.

For decades starting in the 1960s, we were told we were a minority in the province, and needed to learn our place. Then, by the 1990s, when we had started to act like a minority, we were told we weren’t one. Rather, as Bockcôté wrote, now we’re an extension of the English-speaking Canadian majority.

It’s so confusing.