BY DAVID JOHNSTON - Guy Matte, a franco-Ontarian who is executive director of the Fondation canadienne pour le dialogue des cultures, says many French speakers in Quebec see the province's English community "as a Trojan Horse. You don’t know what’s in it, but you’re afraid of what’s in it.”
MONTREAL - I heard a term I was unfamiliar with this past weekend in reference to anglos who have left Quebec: The Aways.
Come to think of it, it would make a great name for a band, like The Dears or The Stills or some of those other local indie bands whose collective influence in pop music prompted Spin magazine in 2005 to dub Montreal “the new Seattle.”
It was Kevin Erskine-Henry, a South Shore anglo community organizer, who used the term at the Quebec Community Group Network’s Strategic Priorities Forum in Montreal. The QCGN is the federally funded umbrella organization for anglo community groups in Quebec that replaced the old Alliance Quebec after it crashed and burned in the years after the emotional aftershocks of the 1995 referendum.
Erskine-Henry said The Aways refers to all those sons and daughters and brothers and sisters of grey-haired Montreal anglos who have left Quebec over the past 40 years. He used the term in connection with the challenge of leadership succession in English-speaking Quebec: Exodus has left us with a dearth of middle-aged professionals who would ordinarily dominate the human-resource pool for community leadership.
In preparation for its three-day conference, the QCGN sent out a survey to people who work in affiliated community organizations and to various ordinary anglophones more generally, asking what they thought the priorities should be for the English-speaking community over the next five years.
More than 525 people responded, and six key priorities were identified and approved over the weekend: access to services in English; community building; identity and renewal; economic prosperity; strong institutions; and leadership succession.
“It all starts with leadership – if you don’t have leadership, you don’t have anything,” Casper Bloom, a Montreal lawyer and long-standing veteran of anglo-community debates dating back to the 1970s, told me.
The QCGN conference was overseen by interim president Noel Burke, dean of the School of Extending Learning at Concordia University and former Quebec assistant deputy minister of education (2002-2007).
It was held against the backdrop of emerging new conflict in Montreal over issues of ethnic and linguistic diversity. The Parti Québécois has launched a crusade against halal and kosher meats and is proposing a new, harsher Bill 101 if elected; the current issue of L’actualité magazine, meanwhile, takes a look at the anglophone community and concludes it hasn’t integrated enough.
On Saturday morning, I sat in on a workshop on the theme of identity and renewal. Guy Rodgers, executive director of the English-language Arts Network, raised an interesting point, suggesting that artists have been leading the way with respect to identity and renewal in the English-speaking community. The fact that Spin and Billboard and the New York Times have all done stories over the past six years portraying a largely French city like Montreal as a vibrant magnet for English musicians tells us something – although Rodgers says it isn’t just musicians driving renewal, but visual artists and others, too. Artists are often in the vanguard of social change – the Refus global of 1948 was a foretelling of the Quiet Revolution – and so it will be interesting to see whether this new vitality will translate into deeper cultural integration in Quebec.
The most interesting thing I heard in my workshop session came after we broke into small groups and I listened to what Guy Matte had to say. Matte is a franco-Ontarian who is executive director of the Fondation canadienne pour le dialogue des cultures. He was there as a special guest of the QCGN.
Matte said that all over the world, minorities tend to be defined by their majorities and the fact of the matter is that in Quebec, the majority feels “it is under siege” and to many francophones, “the anglophone community is seen as a Trojan Horse. You don’t know what’s in it, but you’re afraid of what’s in it.”
For me, this brought an image to mind and I shared it with the group: the Trojan Horse as an official anglo float in the St. Jean Baptiste Day Parade. Imagine it rolling east on Sherbrooke St. E. with various windows open on the sides of the horse and anglos inside waving out to the crowds. I was relieved to see that my joke drew laughter instead of derision, but I think Matte makes a very good point: anglophones and the anglophone community need to remember that they are still seen as threatening in Quebec. That is the inconvenient truth, whether we like it or not. And so future leadership will have to contend with this reality and have an element of political sophistication to it.
I covered the conference on Twitter. To see my tweets, go to NUp davidojohnston
djohnston NUp montrealgazette.com