History-based hate literature

DON MACPHERSON
Montreal Gazette - Saturday, November 24, 2001

Normand Lester knows the enemy. In addition to being the historical enemy of the French, one reads in his controversial and, therefore, best-selling new book, the English are also "jealous of French women, food, geography and climate."

Somehow, this does not quite jibe with Lester's opinion the English also consider themselves superior to everybody else, especially the French.

But it is indicative of the schoolyard level of profundity of his book, Le Livre Noir du Canada Anglais (The Black Book of English Canada).

Its representation of relations between French and English in this country is like the simplest of newspaper comic strips, all black and white outlines, with no shades of gray.

The good guys are the French, except for the "traitors, sellouts and collaborators" who co-operate with the enemy. The bad guys are the English, except for a very few who unquestioningly accept the nationalist viewpoint.

If the English long considered Quebec a "priest-ridden province," it is because they themselves imposed the Catholic church upon it. If French Canadians ever resorted to violence, it is because the English had provoked them. If the fascist Adrien Arcand attracted a following in Quebec between the world wars, it is because he was secretly financed by the Conservatives, including Prime Minister R.B. Bennett, who hoped to break the Liberals' electoral domination of the province.

Lester and his sympathizers (he has been suspended from his job as a Radio-Canada television investigative reporter over the book) disingenuously present the book as an answer to the televised Heritage Minutes, which depict French-English relations throughout Canadian history as friendly.

If only it were that, an alternative history of Canada. We should not be afraid to face the truth about the less glorious aspects of our past. And there is not one history of Canada but many, as seen from different points of view. If we want to understand each other, we need to know each other's histories.

But Lester's book is not just a response to a sanitized official history. It is retaliation for contemporary Quebec-bashing by English Canadians; Lester is French Quebec's answer to National Post columnist Diane Francis, serving us a taste of our own medicine, shrieking with horror at every new outrage (he is in love with the exclamation point, using at least one on every page of his book).

And so his book is not just history, but history-based hate literature, based on sweeping generalizations about the English. For Lester, it is not only the English who committed the atrocities against the French-Canadian population after the Lower Canada Rebellion or those who hanged Louis Riel who are evil. It is all the English, who hate the French and are obsessed with dominating them, even eradicating them.

And, he insists, the English have not changed. In particular, the English of Quebec are the same "arrogant" and "dominant" minority they have always been. Alliance Quebec is the modern version of the Doric Club, an anti-French political street gang of the 1840s. The Gazette and its readers have not changed since the latter, at the urging of the former, burned down the Montreal parliament building in 1849 to protest against legislation compensating innocent French Canadians for losses during the repression of the Lower Canada Rebellion.

Just to make sure his point is not missed, he sometimes refers to the English of that period as "anglophones" or "anglos," terms that did not exist at the time but were introduced in recent years to refer to the contemporary, multi-ethnic, English-speaking community.

This is the book for which the nationalist Société Saint Jean Baptiste de Montréal honoured Lester this week with its annual prize for journalism. And it's one of the recent publications that Premier Bernard Landry recommended to sovereignists in his opening speech to the Parti Québécois national council last Saturday.